Mark Kobayashi-Hillary writes ‘The SocialITe’ blog for Computer Weekly, focused on the enterprise use of social media. I asked him to give me an introduction to effective tagging of online content.
What is tagging and why is it so important?
Tagging creates a searchable description of the content. It’s easy to go out and search for content when it’s just text, like a news story or a blog, but if you are searching for a photo or video then you will only find it if the content creator has attached some descriptive tags.
For videos which are hosted online, such as on YouTube, what is more important out of video title and video tags, and why?
The title is something that stands out when the video is listed in search results, so that is important, but it is the effective use of the tags themselves that will help the content to be found in the first place.
Then where do photo or video titles and descriptions come in? How do you make them most effective?
Try to be direct about the content in the title. Imagine what would make you select the video if it was one of many in a list of results. The description is just an opportunity to add some narrative explaining the content of the video. It’s important to give a good description of course, but talking about “Dave and Sandra’s wedding” in a description is entirely different to the tags you might use.
When tagging photos and videos, how do you know what tags to use?
As I just mentioned, tagging can be directly descriptive or more oblique. For example, in the wedding video, you might want to tag the happy couple by including their names as tags because they are clearly in the video, but then you might tag the video with some more generic tags such as WEDDING, HAPPINESS, LOVE, CHURCH – that’s assuming you take the view that getting married is a happy event! You may also add some geographic references and even a postcode. When I shoot videos near to my home in west London I will almost always include EALING LONDON W5 as tags, because then the area itself is also associated with the video.
Put simply, try tagging your content with what is directly in the image, what it signifies or is related to, and where it is taking place – with those simple pointers you can create really good tags that ensure your content is found easily.
Mark Kobayashi-Hillary writes ‘The SocialITe’ blog for Computer Weekly, focused on the enterprise use of social media. His ‘Talking Outsourcing’ blog in Computing was even turned into a book-of-a-blog in 2009. Mark has written several books about technology and globalisation, including ‘Global Services’, ‘Who Moved My Job?’, and ‘Building a Future with BRICs’. He is a visiting lecturer at London South Bank University.
